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I am not sure why it is so hard for me to find an answer to a problem that I am having.

I am using TeXstudio 2.3 on OSX 10.6.

TeXstudio has a "preview" function which, as I understand it, is supposed to allow for quick previewing of a section of a document using the built-in preview pane of the IDE. However, when I try to preview by right-clicking and selecting "Preview Selection", nothing happens. The preview pane is empty (blank). There are no messages in the log file

I've looked at the user manual as well as searched many forums, but there is no documentation of how to enable this function. If there is any required package that I am missing, there is no manual to direct me to it. I've tried the 3 different command options in the configuration of TeXstudio with no avail.

Are there any packages required to enable this function, or any document preparation that I must do?

UPDATE:

I have experimented and discovered some inconsistencies. Eventually, I was able to get the previewer to work on one of my documents, however I had to switch my TeXstudio preview settings to use the "dvips/ghostscript" command option. For some reason, it still doesn't work with another document I have though. I'm going to do more investigating to see if I can find any particular discrepancies with the nonworking document. I have the preview package installed so that isn't the issue.

More info, with my document that doesn't have preview working, there is not even a command shown in the "messages" panel. Whereas, in the document with preview working, it shows the command being run:

Process started: "/usr/texbin/latex" -interaction=nonstopmode -ini "&latex hg13473 \dump"

Process started: "/usr/texbin/latex" -interaction=nonstopmode "w13473".tex

Process exited normally

Process exited normally

Process started: "/usr/texbin/dvips" -E  -o "w13473".ps "w13473".dvi

Process exited normally

Process started: /usr/local/bin/gs  -q -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=png16m -dEPSCrop -sOutputFile="/var/folders/Rg/RgUuzvT1EWaY1iclZahVO++++TI/-Tmp-/w134731.png" "/var/folders/Rg/RgUuzvT1EWaY1iclZahVO++++TI/-Tmp-/w13473.ps"

Process exited normally
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  • Are you first compiling the document? I use TeXShop and TeXWorks, and you have to first process the document via pdflatex and then you can see the preview and go back and forth (via synctex) between the PDF and .tex file. – Peter Grill Apr 10 '12 at 18:11
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    Matt, perhaps this features uses the preview package, do you have that installed? – Torbjørn T. Apr 10 '12 at 18:45
  • @Torbjørn T. I have the TeXstudio and I just installed preview.sty. The tab is still blank and shows nothing. However, a latex formatted preview of any snippet of text that I highlight now shows up in the editor window right below the text I highlight.Maybe the developers mean for this to show up in the preview tab at some point. – Ariel Apr 11 '12 at 0:30
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    Yes, I see the same. It is the other way around though, the changelog for v. 2.1 reads Selection preview become faster and is shown within the text. In other words, the Preview tab has become redundant. – Torbjørn T. Apr 11 '12 at 6:29
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Based on Torbjørn's answer, there is a way to get the preview to show in the preview tab. First install preview.sty. On fedora/ubuntu, you can do this with

sudo yum install tex-preview 
sudo apt-get install preview-latex-style

The on TeXstudio go to Options > Preview > Display mode > Choose always show preview in preview panel. You can also tweak other attributes of the preview here.

Anyway, thanks for asking this question. There are so many features in TeXstudio but not so much documentation.

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  • 1
    I have experimented and discovered some inconsistencies. Eventually, I was able to get the previewer to work on one of my documents, however I had to switch my TeXstudio preview settings to use the "dvips/ghostscript" command option. For some reason, it still doesn't work with another document I have though. I'm going to do more investigating to see if I can find any particular discrepancies with the nonworking document. I have the preview package installed so that isn't the issue. – mattgately Apr 11 '12 at 14:44
  • Hmm... it works with all the three options in my viewer. The preamble is displayed as-is though. I also noticed that if you locally select portions of the document to preview, formatting in the preview is terrible. – Ariel Apr 11 '12 at 14:50
  • More info, with my document that doesn't have preview working, there is not even a command shown in the "messages" panel. Whereas, in the document with preview working, it shows the command being run. – mattgately Apr 11 '12 at 15:13
  • In Fedora 17, sudo yum install 'tex(preview.sty)' gives ` No package tex(preview.sty) available. Error: Nothing to do. However there is a tex-preview package (separate from texlive, but it doesn't install preview` package as it is not detected by latex. – alfC Sep 1 '12 at 1:24

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